Scattered

A birthday post

Today is my sixty-first birthday. As my friend Lisa said, now you’re committed to your sixties. Indeed. Strangely enough, or not, each decade has gotten better. As a woman, I’m more in my body; I’m more myself. It’s easier to walk out and be in the world than it was when I was younger. My feet, most days, are on the ground.

Tonight we’re going to celebrate with a concert at SF Jazz. Bassist Stanley Clarke is playing a tribute to Chick Corea and Return to Forever. I discovered I loved jazz when we first went to see our friend and jazz violinist Mads Tolling perform at Yoshi’s in Oakland in 2012. I love the rhythms of jazz, the improvisation, how the musicians merge with their instruments, and how the instruments talk back and forth, like a crazy call and response. Jazz is like poetry to me. I’d like to write poetry that sounds like jazz; I’ve played around with it a bit. There are jazz poets, however—like Langston Hughes and the Beat poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Bob Kaufman—who wrote jazz poetry that became to my mind its own music.

“Scattered”¹ is a poem inspired by a Stanley Clarke concert. I wrote it during a time when I wasn’t doing much writing, but seeing that concert opened me up to poetry again. I think my sixties are going to be about poetry.

Scattered

Each morning when I walk and try to 
be one with the path through the park
I’m everywhere else instead.

I’ve approached life as 
I’ve approached faith,
a bit of this, a bit of that.

The journey today 
is from bed to desk and back.
I wake at five and look at my phone 
read news headlines that send me 
back to bed.

Years ago I used to wake at five 
to write in the dark on those
still unpublished novels.
Today I’m devoted to
coffee and cats 
napping and baseball.

But Saturday night in the jazz club
cabaret seats right at the stage
I watch Stanley Clarke and his band
bass and violin
piano and keyboard
tabla and drums
call and response
notes and song
each body an instrument

I want that still: to be one with 
my pen or pencil, the rhythm 
of my fingers on the keyboard.

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I finally received my copies of my chapbook Punctuated! It took over three months to get my copies, but now I have lots of them. To celebrate, I’m offering subscribers a chance to buy a signed copy for $11, which includes postage. If you would like one, please send me a direct message with your address and I’ll give you the payment details.

1. “Scattered,” was originally published in Eclectica, July/August 2019, https://www.eclectica.org/v23n3/pickrell.html